Imagining the TENTH Dimension

This animation illustrates the concepts presented in chapter one of the book "Imagining the Tenth Dimension"

http://tenthdimension.com/medialinks.php

Installing XV Graphics Viewer in Ubuntu 8.04

I followed the script in the ref below but ran into problem when building XV in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy. Note that my system has most all the build-essentials and stuff required for developers but these are some things it was missing; therefore, you may still be missing some packages since the basic ubuntu install is not really designed for the developer.

#!/bin/bash
# getxv.sh
#
cd /tmp
wget ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/xv/xv-3.10a.tar.gz
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/png-mng/xv-3.10a-jumbo-patches-20050501.tar.gz
wget http://bok.fas.harvard.edu/debian/xv/xv-3.10a-jumbo20050501-1.diff.gz
tar xvzf xv-3.10a.tar.gz
tar xvzf xv-3.10a-jumbo-patches-20050501.tar.gz
gzip -d xv-3.10a-jumbo20050501-1.diff.gz
cd xv-3.10a
patch -p1 < ../xv-3.10a-jumbo-fix-patch-20050410.txt
patch -p1 < ../xv-3.10a-jumbo-enh-patch-20050501.txt
patch -p1 < ../xv-3.10a-jumbo20050501-1.diff
chmod 755 debian/rules 
apt-get install libc6-dev
# In Ubuntu I had to change this to xorg-dev meta package
#apt-get install xlibs-dev
apt-get install xorg-dev
apt-get install libjpeg62-dev
apt-get install libtiff4-dev
apt-get install libpng12-dev
make
cp xv /usr/local/bin

ref: Installing the XV Graphics Program in Ubuntu

VLC and Other codecs to play videos in Ubuntu

# WARNING: IF YOU HAVE JAUNTY, CHANGE "hardy.list to jaunty.list
#Install VLC and Other codecs to play video, dvd, and mp3
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
apt-get install medibuntu-keyring
apt-get update
apt-get install libdvdcss2 w32codecs non-free-codecs
apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-esd mozilla-plugin-vlc
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

How to tell if your internet is up in Linux?

When on a local net or using wifi (that's just about everybody), you really need a way to tell if the "internet" is up or not.  Of course the network applet tells you the wifi or network is up, that is not what you need to know.  You need to know if the internet connection is up.  Here's a cool Gnome panel applet that does just that - it's just not installed on Hardy (Ubuntu 8.04) by default.

Link Monitor Applet is a GNOME Panel Applet displaying the round-trip time to a set of hosts in a bar graph.

Link Monitor Applet features include:

• A line graph able to display up to one week of round-trip time data
• Country flags and names
• Full ICMP and ICMPv6 support
• HIG 2.0 compliance

Link Monitor Applet is free software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

sudo apt-get install link-monitor-applet

After  install with the command above, add the applet to gnome panel.  Add the OpenDNS host 208.67.222.222 and Delay to 10 seconds, Graphs scale to 3 seconds, and Tooltip to 5 minutes.  That should get you started.  Now hover the mouse over the Link Monitor Applet and you can tell if you are up or down and for how long it's been down, etc.  Very nice tool!

Even the Windows network tool can't always tell if you are online:(  With Linux and this applet, you will always know if your internet connection is up and it's displayed in a nice little graph.

Reply to mailing list addon/patch for Thunderbird

Adds a "reply to mailing list" button to your toolbar and the message menu.

Reply to Mailing List addon for Thunderbird (experimental)

How can import GPG keys automatically from within Evolution?

If you receive a signed GPG/PGP message from someone and you do not yet have his public key in your GPG/PGP keyring. You can make GPG automatically download and add unknown GPG/PGP keys of received messages by adding the following two lines to the file $HOME/.gnupg/gpg.conf:

       keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net
       keyserver-options auto-key-retrieve

The actual link (URI) to the keyserver is only one example and may be different - you can also choose other servers.

How to make middle mouse click scroll

Just add these lines to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in Hardy!

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier    "Configured Mouse"
    Driver        "mouse"
    Option        "CorePointer"
    Option        "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
    Option        "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
    Option        "EmulateWheel" "true"
    Option        "EmulateWheelButton" "2"
EndSection

Sorry, no help in Jaunty.  Took a look at xorg.conf on a jaunty box and it was almost blank.  I hate the way they keep changing stuff.  Sticking with LTS for now.